Existential questions raised in 'Rick and Morty'

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NonZeroSum
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Existential questions raised in 'Rick and Morty'

Post by NonZeroSum »

I'm a huge fan of this show and the questions it brings up, which make for great common ground to discuss existential philosophy with people I meet on my travels. I think it aligns really well with Camus' philosophy [1] how Rick is grappling with absurdity of the universe but finds sanity and comfort in fostering his essentialist ties to family: “The misery and greatness of this world: it offers no truths, but only objects for love. Absurdity is king, but love saves us from it.”

Camus himself would accept that he falls back on an unphilosophically rigorous form of essentialism 'a commitment to others' to explain how we find meaning. [2] [3] But other philosophers have found great promise in a commitment to an anti-essentialist nomadic ethics [4] that asks what 'wasted lives'[5] can tell us about what we currently value as a society and how we can expand that realm [6]. I think we can see this in how Rick practices science and rebellion simultaneously [7], but then it is just a cartoon TV show :P what are other people’s thoughts? are you as excited about season 3 as I am? [8]

P.S. Does anyone else find the way Rick and Morty grapples with our worst fears and anxieties [9] - having to bury our dead selves from another universe in the back yard - really comically relieving of stress. As opposed to the bad taste with which Futurama in a similar sci-fi themed show turned pulling on kids heart strings from sci-fi themed drama into a form of horror when they left the domesticated dog to die waiting his whole life for his owner Fry to come home (it was going to be Frys' mother originally)?

________________

References:

1. Rick and Morty - Finding Meaning in Life - youtube.com/watch?v=ez1rWBPznEc

2. In Search of Authenticity; From Kierkegaard to Camus by Jacob Golomb

3. From Solitude to Solidarity; How Camus Left Nihilism Behind - vqronline.org/articles/solitude-solidarity
By late 1942, shortly before he entered the French Resistance, Camus was reassessing the limits of absurdity. What would the world make of a thinker who announced: “Up to now I was going in the wrong direction. I am going to begin all over”? It didn’t matter, he shrugged. He, at least, knew it was proof that “he is worthy of thought.” Absurdity, he saw, was nothing more than a first step toward the truth. In his private journal, he wrote that the absurd “teaches nothing.” Instead of looking only at ourselves, as do Sisyphus or Nietzsche’s superman, we must look to others: We are condemned to live together in a precarious, unsettling world. “The misery and greatness of this world: it offers no truths, but only objects for love. Absurdity is king, but love saves us from it.”

Love saves us from absurdity. At this point, Camus shed Nietzsche: Commitment to others becomes primordial in a world streaked by the absurd. This is the subject of The Rebel, a book conceived during the occupation and published in 1952. The rebel, affirms Camus, rejects not just metaphysical, but also political absurdity: namely, a state’s insistence on giving meaning to the unjustifiable suffering it inflicts on its citizens. The rebel not only says “no” to an unspeaking universe, but also says “no” to an unjust ruler. The rebel “refuses to allow anyone to touch what he is. He is fighting for the integrity of one part of his being. He does not try, primarily, to conquer, but simply to impose”—to impose himself on a meaningless world, as well as on those who deny his humanity.

Most critically, however, the rebel seeks to impose a limit on his own self. Rebellion is an act of defense, not offense; it is equipoise, not a mad charge against an opponent. Ultimately, it requires an active watchfulness in regard to the humanity of others as well as oneself. Just as the absurd never authorizes despair, much less nihilism, a tyrant’s acts never authorize one to become tyrannical in turn. The rebel does not deny his master as a fellow human being, he denies him only as his master; and he resists the inevitable temptation to dehumanize his former oppressor.

For Camus, rebellion lives only as long as does the balance between daring and prudence. Hence Camus’s embrace of a profoundly un-Nietzschean “philosophy of limits.” Since we cannot know everything, this philosophy argues that we cannot do anything we please to others. Rebellion, unlike revolution, “aspires to the relative and can only promise an assured dignity coupled with relative justice. It supposes a limit at which the community of man is established.” Revolution comes easily, while rebellion “is nothing but pure tension.”

Ultimately, rebellion means unending self-vigilance: It is the art of active restraint. At the end of The Rebel, Camus declared that our task is to “serve justice so as not to add to the injustice of the human condition, to insist on plain language so as not to increase the universal falsehood, and to wager, in spite of human misery, for happiness.” His many critics dismissed this phrase as mere grandiloquence, a heroic glibness disguising an absence of deep thought. Yet the truth of the matter is that there is nothing glib or easy about Camus’s claim. Instead, it recognizes the difficulty, doubts, and desperation tied to true rebellion, and the realization we must live with provisional outcomes.
4. Anarchism and Animal liberation; Essays on Complementary Elements of Total Liberation
This is also strikingly similar to the nomadic ethics proposed by Deleuze and Guattari, which I have explored at length elsewhere (Eloff 2010, 2013). In brief, for Deleuze nomadic ethics requires epistemological humility; it is anti-essentialist and non-normative, situated and contingent and emerges from situations themselves instead of being imposed upon them. It is an immanent ethics of experimentation that appeals to nothing outside of itself, a bio-centered, nonanthropocentric egalitarianism that recognizes our enfolding of and enfoldment within the world around us and a care for the self that is immediately a care for the not-self, for the infinitely complex web of relations within, and which are, our shared habitats. It is a practice of becoming together in constant differenciation, in affirmation of a deeper principle of difference, of differentiation, with an enhanced sense of situated accountability that “enlarges the sense of collectively bound subjectivity to non-human agents, from our genetic neighbours the animals, to the earth as a biosphere as a whole” (Braidotti 2006, p. 136).
5. Wasted Lives by Zygmunt Bauman

6. The Politics of Post Anarchism by Saul Newman
The politics of resistance to the biopolitical order of state capitalism suggests the possibility of an outside to this order; of points of rupture
and anteriority in which we see a glimpse of alternative ways of life. While we must acknowledge the pervasiveness of this order and its formidable power, we should at the same time be able to discern its cracks, vulnerabilities and inconsistencies. Massimo de Angelis makes the important point – taking a certain distance from Hardt and Negri – that the order confronted by radical political struggles today is not complete or all- encompassing: it is, on the contrary, subject to tensions, discontinuities and moments of rupture which leave openings for alternative social relationships to emerge. Indeed, he argues that there is more to our world than capitalism; that we already engage in social relationships that are not completely subsumed by capitalism, although their autonomy is always threatened by it.

It is a matter, then, of expanding the realm of these alternative practices, relationships and ‘value struggles’ – of expanding the dimension of what de Angelis calls the commons, in opposition to the colonising tendencies of capitalism. We should also recognise, with Foucault, the reversibility of power relationships, even those that seem so overwhelming; that while power might be ubiquitous, it is also characterised by instabilities and moments of resistance.
7. Is Rick from Rick & Morty The Ideal Scientist? - youtube.com/watch?v=XZLN1PN3L4I

8. dailydot.com/parsec/rick-and-morty-season-3-release-date-trailer-teaser/

9. Rick and Morty Season 3 Sneak Peek on Development Meeting - youtube.com/watch?v=z91-IgdO1Wk
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Re: Existential questions raised in 'Rick and Morty'

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I haven't seen the show, I'll confess I don't watch much.

I think I see where you're coming from here, although I disagree with it.
Personal emotional connections tend to be volatile on their own without a firm grounding. Since they're attached to mortals in the same cycle of life and death the person forming those connections is, there can be a point of realizing futility and superficiality to the whole thing without a more profound reason to love. That reason can come from respect and pride in moral character, which is the true grounding -- an attempt to define morality in terms of emotional connections to other mortals would be circular reasoning.
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Re: Existential questions raised in 'Rick and Morty'

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I must confess I am not a fan either, but I have watched the first season and a bunch of other random episodes. Some of them were funny and thought provoking, others seemed to fall into what David Foster Wallace, referring to Bret Easton Ellis's American psycho, called 'black cynicism'.
Larry McCaffery: But at least in the case of “American Psycho” I felt there was something more than just this desire to inflict pain—or that Ellis was being cruel the way you said serious artists need to be willing to be.

David Foster Wallace: You’re just displaying the sort of cynicism that lets readers be manipulated by bad writing. I think it’s a kind of black cynicism about today’s world that Ellis and certain others depend on for their readership. Look, if the contemporary condition is hopelessly shitty, insipid, materialistic, emotionally retarded, sadomasochistic, and stupid, then I (or any writer) can get away with slapping together stories with characters who are stupid, vapid, emotionally retarded, which is easy, because these sorts of characters require no development. With descriptions that are simply lists of brand-name consumer products. Where stupid people say insipid stuff to each other. If what’s always distinguished bad writing—flat characters, a narrative world that’s cliched and not recognizably human, etc.—is also a description of today’s world, then bad writing becomes an ingenious mimesis of a bad world. If readers simply believe the world is stupid and shallow and mean, then Ellis can write a mean shallow stupid novel that becomes a mordant deadpan commentary on the badness of everything. Look man, we’d probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is? In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what’s human and magical that still live and glow despite the times’ darkness. Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it’d find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it. You can defend “Psycho” as being a sort of performative digest of late-eighties social problems, but it’s no more than that.
I have, however, watched far too few episode to give you a satisfying reply. I do find that a lot of what is considered to be cool/interesting popular art nowadays displays the same kind of postmodern cynicism though. I'll have a look at those links.
Brimstone wrote: That reason can come from respect and pride in moral character, which is the true grounding -- an attempt to define morality in terms of emotional connections to other mortals would be circular reasoning.
Would you expand a little bit on this? What do you mean by 'moral character' here?
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Re: Existential questions raised in 'Rick and Morty'

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DarlBundren wrote: Tue Feb 28, 2017 6:10 am
Brimstone wrote: That reason can come from respect and pride in moral character, which is the true grounding -- an attempt to define morality in terms of emotional connections to other mortals would be circular reasoning.
Would you expand a little bit on this? What do you mean by 'moral character' here?
Truly loving somebody is loving somebody for who he or she is, which is NOT simply a short summary of how he or she loves pizza and the movie Titanic, lives for soft rock, and dislikes a certain genre of music or style of clothing.
Meaningful existential character is founded on moral value, not superficial material preferences and a set of generic experiences and memories shaped by pop culture.

If you can reduce some form of love to biological happenstance, it's very shallow indeed.
If you can reduce it to naive reciprocity (I love him because he loves me, and he loves me because I love him), it's arguably even shallower.

If you're trying to derive meaning in life from those tenuous, temporary, and shallow bonds, then you're looking in the wrong place.
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Re: Existential questions raised in 'Rick and Morty'

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Meaningful existential character is founded on moral value, not superficial material preferences and a set of generic experiences and memories shaped by pop culture
.

So you are saying that we should love people because of their moral character, not because they happen to like what we like? When you talk about morality here, are you referring to something we are willingly pursuing? As in ' I do my best to be moral'.
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Re: Existential questions raised in 'Rick and Morty'

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DarlBundren wrote: Tue Feb 28, 2017 3:14 pm So you are saying that we should love people because of their moral character, not because they happen to like what we like?
More or less.
DarlBundren wrote: Tue Feb 28, 2017 3:14 pm When you talk about morality here, are you referring to something we are willingly pursuing? As in ' I do my best to be moral'.
In terms of the moral vector, both magnitude and direction are meaningful.
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Re: Existential questions raised in 'Rick and Morty'

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brimstoneSalad wrote: Tue Feb 28, 2017 4:55 pm I think I see where you're coming from here, although I disagree with it.
Personal emotional connections tend to be volatile on their own without a firm grounding. Since they're attached to mortals in the same cycle of life and death the person forming those connections is, there can be a point of realizing futility and superficiality to the whole thing without a more profound reason to love. That reason can come from respect and pride in moral character, which is the true grounding -- an attempt to define morality in terms of emotional connections to other mortals would be circular reasoning.
Sorry I forgot all about this.

I think we can both agree that any system which can be shown to produce the most amount of rational moral actors – is the best one. Like the story about Shin Dong-hyuks’ evolving morality as he left North Korea, it’s a thoroughly mind numbing place to live, with all meaningful choices about how you should live your life decided for you by the state.

What I think Camus was trying to express was a world of moral rational actors where we value and acknowledge the absurdity and chaos of the universe, and that infantesible small chance that lead us to these material conditions in which we can reason with each other and create culture. In this way valuing the opportunity that this clean slate affords us to rebel against the injustices of the past based on faulty reasoning of divine right of kings, prestige, etc. It’s about not going into philosophical denial about the material nature of our existence and making of it the best that we can.

The nomadic ethics that is an extension of this logic, simply says what a great world it will be when we can no longer use this faulty reasoning of essentialising the outsider and using ‘the other’ as a scapegoat. What new forms of art and life will we see when people are allowed to follow their own destiny. What beauty can be found under a diversity of conditions, where people are able to reach their full potential and cultural experimentation is at it's highest.

Camus' essentialism can be seen then as an appreciation of the simple material pleasures of daily life, which emotionally sustain us and give us the right sensibilities to approach philosophical matters. "If there is a sin against this life, it is not so much in despairing of life, but in hoping for another life, and eluding the quite grandeure of this one... people attract me in so much as they are empassioned about life and avid for happiness."
- Albert Camus quote found in this great condensed video of his life's work by 'School of Life'
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQOfbObFOCw
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Re: Existential questions raised in 'Rick and Morty'

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NonZeroSum wrote: It’s about not going into philosophical denial about the material nature of our existence and making of it the best that we can.
I think it's a little more than that. Camus was sentimental, a hedonist. Not only he does not deny the material nature of our existence he completely embraces it. The main influences here are Heidegger (the idea that our true identity is revealed when breakdowns occur) and Kierkegaard who, in his Fear and Trembling, talks about the absurd existence of Abraham. Abraham left his normal life because he was asked by God to sacrifice his son. He obliged without a word of complaint. When eventually God allowed him to go, he was forced to continue with life in spite of all the flaws he was now aware of. That's the absurdity Camus is talking about, but, in his case, without any involvement of God. If meaning cannot be found in the Almighty anymore, Camus thought, people had to find it at its most basic level: feelings and emotions.

This was not new. Take a look at Pasolini or even at Orwell and their obsession with everyday life and the working class. The working class, according to them, was more spontaneous, less hypocritical, they didn't have to pretend being something else. They could feel. Camus simply told us to enjoy the ride, to keep move forward without forgetting to smile. 'Keep calm and don't give a fuck', as it were.

However, as Sartre himself said, Camus's aim is to render true experience and yet he does so by slyly filtering out all the meaningful connections which are such an important part of it. That is, Camus is more focused on the 'being' rather than the 'being-with'.
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Re: Existential questions raised in 'Rick and Morty'

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DarlBundren wrote: Fri Mar 17, 2017 9:59 am
NonZeroSum wrote: It’s about not going into philosophical denial about the material nature of our existence and making of it the best that we can.
I think it's a little more than that. Camus was sentimental, a hedonist. . .

. . .'Keep calm and don't give a fuck', as it were.
I think it's somewhere in between moral vigilance and hedonism. Thanks for the philosophical comparisons - all very interesting. I meant to mention the literary too, Orwell's ode to English tea and cricket is remarkably similar to Camus' ode to the Meditaranian fresh sun, sea and air. Zora Neal Hustons' book 'Mules and Men' can be seen as a nomadic ethics of recapturing our ethnographical legacy.

I think you should give Camus a little more credit than that sentiment, I was simply repeating what he felt was his key philosophical achievement after joining the French resistance, no small deed given the Vichy French sentiment at the time that De'Gaul was a traitor and they had to fight off the allies to remain colonially whole for such time as an axis victory was naturally going to come about. “Serve justice so as not to add to the injustice of the human condition, to insist on plain language so as not to increase the universal falsehood, and to wager, in spite of human misery, for happiness.”
However, as Sartre himself said, Camus's aim is to render true experience and yet he does so by slyly filtering out all the meaningful connections which are such an important part of it. That is, Camus is more focused on the 'being' rather than the 'being-with'.
I would just have to flatly disagree, there was much romantic marxist detachment in Satre's writing, Camus simply emphasises an authentic being that is more conducive to knowing who and how you truly want to be with others. Simone de Beauvoir also made this leap when she began to conceive of her being and politics as situational in 'The Second Sex.'
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Re: Existential questions raised in 'Rick and Morty'

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I think you should give Camus a little more credit than that sentiment, I was simply repeating what he felt was his key philosophical achievement after joining the French resistance, no small deed given the Vichy French sentiment at the time that De'Gaul was a traitor and they had to fight off the allies to remain colonially whole for such time as an axis victory was naturally going to come about. “Serve justice so as not to add to the injustice of the human condition, to insist on plain language so as not to increase the universal falsehood, and to wager, in spite of human misery, for happiness.” 
Camus was not a bad writer, I have read many of his books. But I just don't think he was very interesting as a philosopher. His philosophy had probably something to do with life in Occupied France, as you point out. Or, at least, one can easily draw a comparison between Abraham and the people who lived in France at the time. Everything was lost, yet life was still there. How do you keep on living in that horrible situation? His reply was to accept that there was no ultimate goal, no grand scheme. The right thing to do, he thought, was rolling up your sleeves and going back to work. Like Sisyphus at the end of the book, when he resumes his endless, purpose-less task and does so with smile. 'One must imagine Sisyphus happy', he says.
I would just have to flatly disagree, there was much romantic marxist detachment in Satre's writing, Camus simply emphasises an authentic being that is more conducive to knowing who and how you truly want to be with others. Simone de Beauvoir also made this leap when she began to conceive of her being and politics as situational in 'The Second Sex.'


Well, that idea was expressed by Sartre himself in his review of The Strager, where he talks about how we perceive experiences as already half-digested and so on. As for his philosophy, both Camus and Sartre can be considered as 'detached', but Sartre was genuinely interested in providing a sort of moral foundation. Something he never achieved.

According to Sartre, there were basically two classes of things. The first one was the pour-soi class, in which were grouped things that lived ''for themselves' and then a second class, the en-soi one, in which there were things that lived 'in themselves'. The first one included self-aware beings and the second one included, more or less, everything else (animals as well). Being in the second class basically meant not being at all, but this 'not-being-ness' was considered as 'something'.

It's an important distinction to him, because 'being nothing' meant being 'free', and freedom, according to him, is something we deeply fear. The more freedom we have, the worse it gets (think Kierkegaard). In order to overcome this freedom, people tie themselves to whatever they can. Deadlines, relationships, projects, you name it. What we do in everyday life, that is, is trying to forget about this freedom and we achieve this by playing different games (think Wittgenstein). One pretends to be a teacher, the next pretends to be a doctor. There is nothing remarkable in this, but sometime people forget about this little game of ours and start saying things like ' There is nothing I can do about this, I have a family, I am white, I am male, I am American' and so on. Sartre though that those were silly excuses. We all are playing a game here, he conceded, but it is this very game that enables us to create meaning. It is in the game that we find purpose. I don't really see this in Camus.

TL,DR I think Sartre is more a 'If life gives you lemons, make lemonade' kind of guy.
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